Palmer: Conservatives have little going for them other than their name, but still terrify the Liberals

VICTORIA - The polls were just closing Thursday night when Conservative Party leader John Cummins arrived at campaign headquarters in Chilliwack-Hope and he lost no time lowering expectations about the likely byelection outcome.

“We’re hoping for a strong second,” he told reporters, belying speculation, including from his own supporters, that the party was poised to win the seat. “If we finish a strong second, we’ll be happy.”

Even that proved beyond the reach of the Conservatives. As the ballot count trickled in, the party’s candidate, criminologist and sometime pundit John Martin, was running third behind the New Democrat and Liberal and there he remained until the final tally of the night.

“Obviously we’d like to do a little better,” Cummins conceded. “But we’re not that big on organization and we were probably outspent five to one.”

To be sure, ground zero for the Martin campaign, located in a major shopping centre just outside the riding boundary, was both prominent and spacious.

But as a Conservative representative hastened to assure me and another reporter, the party had lucked out in finding the space.

The storefront, being the abandoned outlet of a financially troubled video rental chain, was available on the cheap. A mere $1,200 a month, lest we get any notions that the Conservatives were flush with cash.

Inside was mainly empty space. The party had cordoned off much of the area in an attempt to concentrate what little energy there was in the room. Even so, the evening had all the oomph of a coffee break at a meeting of the birdwatchers club.

Even a losing campaign will muster a reasonable showing of enthusiasts once volunteers finish phoning supporters, driving them to the polls and scrutinizing the vote count.

But the Conservatives had next to no campaign workers to begin with. By Cummins’s reckoning, the party fielded maybe 20 to 30 volunteers on election day. Judging from the turnout at the campaign office, every one of them must have been there.

For the rest, Cummins said the party managed to finance a single run of brochures and some lawn signs, a number of which were in storage at campaign headquarters Thursday.

Otherwise, candidate Martin relied on door-knocking, media coverage and the folks talking among themselves. Thus the Conservative election “machine.” Not some well-bankrolled, surreptitiously staffed backroom insurgency, but a campaign run on a shoestring.

As I looked over the scene at Thursday evening — a handful of mostly aging volunteers politely digesting returns that showed their party headed for third place in what ought to be prime territory for Conservatives — I was struck by how this amateur-hour operation had nevertheless managed to terrify the B.C. Liberals.

The governing party threw everything it had into the Chilliwack campaign. Weeks of unofficial electioneering before the actual call for the 28-day campaign. Multiple visits by the premier and her ministers.

Endorsements for Liberal candidate Laurie Throness from every willing ex-Socred, ex-Reformer and ex-Tory who’d ever passed through Chilliwack, never mind represented the community at any electoral level.

A huge advertising blitz, brochures and campaign signs galore, and a hefty presence on the ground. Liberal provincial co-chair Rich Coleman reckoned there were 500 to 600 volunteers on election day alone.

But all that only served to highlight a dramatic contrast in terms of outcomes.

The Liberal machine, a real one by any measure, managed to rustle up 4,399 votes on behalf of Throness, for about 31 per cent of the total cast in the byelection.

The Conservatives’ Martin drew 3,548 votes and 25 per cent — or, if you prefer 851 votes and six points fewer than the Liberals — while campaigning on word of mouth and little else.

Then again he was unencumbered by the accumulated baggage of more than a decade in office that stretches behind the B.C. Liberals, frustrating all efforts to associate their new leader with the theme of change and imposing a kind of law of diminishing returns on every tax dollar spent to turn things around.

The Conservatives did not do as well in Thursday’s other byelection, also won by the NDP. Still the 15 per cent for candidate Christine Clark in Port Moody-Coquitlam was enough to give the Liberals fits there as well.

The cost-effectiveness of the Conservative campaign in Chilliwack also illustrated the challenge for those B.C. Liberals seeking to somehow unite centre-right political forces here in B.C.

Merge? Coalesce? With whom and with what? There’s little organization there to merge with, few resources to absorb, not even much of a platform at this point, and the elected caucus consists of one bitter recent defector from the B.C. Liberals.

The Conservative name itself? Yes, the Liberals would very much like to get their hands on the political marketing rights to that particular brand, to the point of offering up the bargaining rights to their own name as a prelude to some sort of merger talks.

But given what Cummins, Martin and their associates were able to accomplish on the strength of the Conservative name and little else Thursday, I can’t see why they’d combine their brand with one as tainted as the B.C. Liberals.

vpalmer@vancouversun.com

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Palmer: Conservatives have little going for them other than their name, but still terrify the Liberals

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